Delivered Into Enemy Hands - Human Rights Watch

“I screamed ‘I want to
die, why don’t you just
Afghanistan II
Maghrebi, like Sharif and Shoroeiya, was taken to a
kill me?’”
second location first by airplane, then by helicopter. He
added that they moved him by car from the helicopter to
his place of detention. He did not know who else was
with him, but he was counting the chains trying to figure out the number of other prisoners
and thought there were about six. At this next location he was put in a cell that was about
2 x 2 meters in size. He was kept naked in this cell, which had a camera and speakers, for
about two of the four months he was there. His legs were shackled together, but from time
to time his hands were free. He had no mattress but a very small rug that he used at night
to try and cover himself up. It was cold. There were other prisoners there and they used to
call out to each other. Once he called out to Di’iki (see full case description in later section),
who answered him. He was hooded some of the time, but his interrogators would
take the hood off during questioning.
Maghrebi told Human Rights Watch that his interrogators spoke English and looked like
Americans or Westerners. They had Arabic-speaking interpreters with them, who he
believed were Americans from different countries of origin. Though he was not clear about
how he knew this, he said one of the interpreters was a woman of Lebanese ancestry and
the other two were men, one of Egyptian ancestry and the other of Moroccan ancestry. He
counted the number of interrogators and said there were exactly 17.
Maghrebi told Human Rights Watch that he nearly went insane in this cell. At one point he
began banging his head against the wall and stopped eating. Reacting to this, guards
chained him again to the wall and put cushions on the wall and on the ground that would
prevent him from injuring himself. He said,
“I screamed ‘I want to die, why don’t you just kill me?’”
They then restrained him with a belt and started “pretending to be nice,” bringing him a
carpet for praying and a Quran. They bathed him, tried to convince him to eat, and took
him to a doctor. It was around this time that they told him that they would be taking him
someplace else, though they did not say where. This place later turned out to be Libya.
65 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | SEPTEMBER 2012